A Pale Horse - Charles Todd [23]
In the basket to one side of the desk, however, was a crumpled sheet of paper. He reached for it, spread it out, and in the shaded light of his torch found that there was only one line on it.
My dear
The start of a letter? To a friend, a lover, a relative? There was no way of knowing.
He crumpled it again and dropped it back into the basket.
Nothing here to tell him who Partridge was, where he might have gone, or when he intended to return.
Certainly nothing mysterious enough to make London worry about where he was.
When Rutledge stepped out of the cottage, he nearly leapt out of his skin as something warm and sinuous wrapped itself around his legs.
“’Ware!” Hamish warned in the same instant.
It was all he could do to stifle a yelp even as his brain absorbed the sound of a soft purr.
Dublin the cat.
He bent down to pet her, and she accepted the salute but was more intent on finding her way into the house. He managed to get the door shut first, and as if displeased, the cat stopped purring and trotted off.
Rutledge stood there for a moment as his heart rate steadied and then made his way to the shed where Partridge kept his motorcar. It was still there, and a bicycle stood in the deeper shadows beyond the bonnet.
The only unusual thing was a small length of carpet that lay crumpled by the boot, a trap for unwary feet. The oil stains down its length, dark as blood in the little light there was, explained its use.
Wherever Gaylord Partridge had gone, he had left on shank’s mare, not his bicycle or his motorcar.
But then he needn’t have gone far to find someone to take him away. For a price, the lorry drivers at The Smith’s Arms would have been willing to let him ride with them as far as he liked. From there he might have gone anywhere by train or bus.
And come back just as inconspicuously.
Gaylord Partridge’s walkabouts, as Quincy had called them.
Rutledge slipped out of the shed and made his way through the darkness in the deepest shadow he could find, until he was well past Wayland’s Smithy.
Where did Partridge go, and why? he asked himself as he walked without haste, listening to the night around him.
Hamish said, “If he was in the war, it’s possible he doesna’ remember where he goes, or why.”
At the clinic where Frances had taken Rutledge to learn how to deal with his own shell shock, there was an officer who went away for days at a time. Physically present, but his mind lost in some other world where his body couldn’t follow, Lieutenant Albany would sit by his window staring inward, and simply not hear or see or feel anything. As if the empty shell of himself waited for him there knowing that in the end he would come back to it. And then, quietly, he did just that, moving and speaking and acting as if nothing had happened, incurious about the hours or days that had passed meanwhile.
Rutledge had no way of knowing if Partridge was a victim of the war. Nothing in his cottage indicated military service, not the way he’d made his bed or the clothing in his armoire. But then that might have been deliberate.
The letter beginning “My dear” could mean there was someone he regularly went to see. And if the Government had no knowledge of that someone, it could well be a woman he preferred to keep secret.
A rendezvous far from the War Office’s prying eyes, a brief escape from whatever it was he’d done to have people watching his every move?
It was distasteful to spy on a man, entering his house without his knowledge, looking at his personal correspondence. The fact that the search hadn’t yielded any useful information made matters worse. No body in the bedroom to explain away Partridge’s absence, no souvenirs of Brighton to point to his whereabouts, no letters giving Rutledge the direction of the man’s family. Was the young woman who’d knocked on Partridge’s door a daughter—or a lover?
Which brought him back to the unseen man who had been questioning Betty Smith at the inn door. If that was Partridge himself, back again and worried about the stranger hanging about in his absence,